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Jensen - “GAFCON is a way of delivering friendship and unity”

GAFCON has released the video of the speech given by the General secretary of the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans, Dr Peter Jensen, to the luncheon in Nairobi during the Archbishop of Canterbury's visit.

In the recording, Dr Jensen outlines the movement's goals and makes an impassioned defence of Anglicans he said had been marginalised and disenfranchised.

Dr Jensen told the gathering of six Primates and Archbishop Welby "I want to say to you that the GAFCON movement is a movement for unity."

He recalled the Primates meeting after the first GAFCON in 2008 "... someone asked the question: ‘Are we leaving the Anglican Communion?’ And immediately all said: ‘No we are not leaving the Anglican Communion; that is not the intention, we would never do that.’

The group applauded when an impassioned Dr Jensen said "But our intention is to gather up the fragments of the Anglican Communion, and what GAFCON has done, particularly in North America, has been to gather up the fragments and to unite and to make sure that our beloved friends like Archbishop Bob Duncan here today, our beloved friends are kept and recognised as the authentic true Anglicans that they are, and that they don’t have to pretend to be something else".

Dr Jensen went on to warn that such situations would happen elsewhere "Indeed it has begun to happen in other places around the Communion, where to stand for Biblical truth is going to cost you very, very dearly indeed, as it has cost our brothers here. And then you will have to ask yourself: who are our friends? Who will stand with us? And GAFCON is a way of delivering friendship, it is a way of delivering unity..."

Dr Jensen recounted the history of the movement, saying the genesis of GAFCON was the authority of Scripture.

"Even before GAFCON, Bishop Nazir-Ali said to me that the debate we were having was about the clarity of Scripture..... he’s right of course: Is the Bible the Bible for everybody, that all can read, in a way in which it interprets itself? Is it the Bible for the lay people as much as it is the Bible for the clergy and anyone else?" the former Archbishop of Sydney said.

"The clarity of the Scriptures - particularly in the area of human sexuality - which is so important for our identity, means that we believe that we know – always ready to look again - but when we look again, the same message appears:: that human sexual expression needs to occur within the bonds of marriage between a man and a woman..." Dr Jensen said.